Upon informing my Grandmother that my political beliefs are becoming
more and more libertarian, I was sandbagged with the question, "Don't
those people believe in more government?" I stood there dumbfounded
for a moment. Thinking this misunderstanding might be a result of miscommunication,
I attempted to clarify, "No, not lib-er-al Gram, libertarian."
She made it clear that she hadn't heard it wrong the first time. Despite
assurances to the contrary, she went away thinking her grandson had
gone slightly batty.

After thinking long and hard about possible sources of her misunderstanding,
I think I've found the culprit.

Q: What does Nadine Strossen, President of the American Civil Liberties
Union describe herself as?
A: A Civil Libertarian.

Q: What does the ACLU do?
A: They sue companies, school districts and all levels of government
into compliance with their agenda.

Q: Which is?
A: Good question. They are against the war on drugs, against restricting
abortion, against the death penalty, against hiding pornography and
against national ID cards.

Q: So they're militant libertarians/anarchists?
A: Not quite. They are also for racial quotas, for welfare as a "right"
and for needle exchanges.

What I propose to demonstrate here is that the term "Civil Libertarian"
is a misnomer. Strossen at al. are no more civil libertarians than I
am a civil conservative or my good friend Chris Burlingame is a civil
liberal or Paul Ehrlich is a civil environmentalist. And they're not
exactly libertarian either. Just try to picture Milton Friedman, Walter
Williams or James Glassman at an ACLU convention. The image doesn't
wash for a good reason, they are natural enemies. They might have brief
moments of agreement but each side could surely say of the other that,
"even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

Let us first take a benign issue where the two sides would probably
agree, campaign finance reform. Friedman et al are in favor of free
speech and would thus oppose reform which stops Congressman Klug from
soliciting funds in excess of a capped amount with which to buy airtime,
posters and the like. It would not bother them that Klug's opponent,
Mayor Muttonhead, was not as popular and thus could not raise as much
as Klug to buy campaign paraphernalia. The marketplace of ideas, after
all, is a marketplace. The fact that Muttonhead was elected because
everyone in his town of fifty wanted to find some way of employing the
blind/deaf/mute/quadrapelegic orphan is too bad and it may sure be a
shame that he will get slaughtered by Klug but that, they say, is life.

Strossen et al would agree that Klug should be able to accept more
than one billion dollars from the dairy industry while he sits on the
committee-to-think-really-hard-about-and-almost-but-not-quite-decide-to-ditch-dairy-subsidies
but this does not mean that they would let poor Mayor Muttonhead go
down without exhausting one hell of a campaign warchest. I'm not kidding
here. Ira Glasser, lawyer for the New York branch of the ACLU wrote
a letter on the subject to the Economist. The ACLU, says Glasser, "favors
establishing a floor of public financing for all qualified candidates
that would provide them with adequate means to get their message to
voters." They would pay for this with tax dollars.

Leave aside for a moment what would count as a "qualified candidate"
or what constitutes "adequate means." Leave aside also the
fact that this could give the federal government even more control than
it now has over how elections proceed. These civil "libertarians"
are endorsing welfare for incompetent, possibly fringe candidates. Friedman
would rather his side lose the fundraising battle then that it go on
the dole.

Onto a more meaningful difference, the ACLU's support of affirmative
action even has theretofore civil libertarian and columnist for the
Village Voice, Nat Hentoff, aghast. Specifically, the ACLU filed an
ammicus currae brief on the side of the University of Washington Law
School opposing one Kuturia Smith in her lawsuit charging racial discrimination
because of quotas imposed by affirmative action.

During a lecture at said university, Hentoff asked the dean if, "considering
her first name, she had been taken for black, would she.. [have] been
admitted? The dean said she would have been."

This is a publicly funded university. Kuturia's fellow taxpayers foot
a substantial portion of the bill so that less wealthy citizens can
afford this kind of education (ask me in another essay if I think we
should be subsidizing future lawyers). Hentoff notes that, "she
had overcome poverty and worked at low-wage jobs throughout her education."
In other words, she was exactly the kind of person Joe Taxpayer shells
out the dollars for.

Bottom line, "The ACLU has reinterpreted "equal protection
of the laws" to exclude persons because of their color. This is
Orwellian civil liberties."

In contrast, Messrs. Friedman, Williams and Glassman believe that,
to the extent that government subsidizes something, it should not discriminate
based on color. But the differences are more fundamental than that.
At bottom, libertarians believe that government is a beast which must
be restrained by constitutional bonds. Civil libertarians think that
government is basically good but must be occasionally chastised.

This came out clearly when Nadine Strossen granted an interview with
Reason Magazine's Cathy Young. Her contradictions were breathtaking.

First, sounding like the most strict constitutionalist, she proclaims,
"We have to be sure that the people are going to support basic
principles so that demagogues cannot be elected running against the
Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court when it supports the Bill of Rights."

But how is one to know when the Supreme Court does or does not support
the Bill of Rights. What yardstick should apply? How about taking the
text of the constitution at face value? No, says Strossen, in response
to a question about why the ACLU doesn't litigate for second amendment
(gun) rights, "I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis,
because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily
coextensive with constitutional rights [T]he fact that something
is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is
a fundamental civil liberty."

Here we have the selective myopic vision of the ACLU in full display.
Those nasty right-wingers are trying to end abortion and put prayer
back in schools. How DARE they! They want to trample on the Bill of
Rights and the Constitution. Those left-wingers want to take guns away
from everybody. Sure, the second amendment prohibits that sort of thing
but who needs the second amendment anyway?

Strossen does not think that a rhetorical question. She concedes that
"What it comes down to is the very strong belief that having a
gun in your home is something that can ultimately fend off the power
of a tyrannical government." She finds that, "really unpersuasive
in the 20th-century context." It might have "made sense in
the 18th century," but she, "would hope that's the kind of
thing we do through words rather than through guns," and that,
to her, "is the function that the First Amendment serves, not the
Second Amendment."

Tell that to the Branch Dividians. Tell that to the loved ones of someone
whose house was broken into by an armed intruder. Tell that to law abiding
Jews who had nothing with which to resist the Nazis. Tell that to the
men who wrote the second amendment. Perhaps they should have just negotiated
with the Brits.

Further embarrassments from the same interview include her slick attempt
to avoid the fact that the ACLU refuses to defend property rights, "People
have rights. Property doesn't have rights" and her meaningless
distinction between Pell Grants and vouchers, "The Pell grant is
clearly constitutional because it's the government giving money directly
to individuals [whereas] in a lot of voucher programs, the money
goes directly to the schools, not to the parents" (that the parents
chose the school, and that the money will follow the kid to another
school apparently hasn't occurred to her).

But her most telling statement concerns the very nature of civil rights:

"Our view is that there are certain fundamental individual rights
which may not be intruded upon or violated. When our Constitution was
written, the state was the only entity in society that had sufficient
power to deprive individuals of fundamental rights. Now we have corporate
concerns with far more power over people's lives than the state ever
had in the l8th century. The market-liberal response is that if the
individual doesn't like what their employer is doing... then the individual
goes off and gets another job. Our view is that's unrealistic."

So if I am applying for a job at Target and they say that, in order
for them to hire me, I first must pass a drug test, my civil rights
have been violated. Say what you want about this belief, it can in no
way be construed as libertarian.

But, if we grant that civil libertarians aren't, what should they be
called? Allow me to coin a new phrase. They support abortion, drug legalization,
absolutely unrestrained speech, legalized prostitution, and a whole
host of other social ills. Then they want the rest of us to pick up
the tab for it. They are not civil libertarians, they are libertine
socialists.